Discuss: Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones

Wow!  Loved this piece, LOVED the image of the camera suspended over a piece of the landscape for millions of years, we should all meditate when we can in that manner about where we live, wonderful.  I too love to pick up stones, little eyes on trails and shorelines, wherever, they clutter my home, this article really gave me language about what all those stones do for me as I reach out for them and try to “possess” them…i am sending this one to friends, thank you.

Hey another “Doerr”...I enjoyed your article! I too have collected stones, rocks,..since the age I could walk! My mother told me I took 30 minutes to cross our driveway because I stopped, as a toddler to look at, and feel, stones.  Even now certain shapes or colors call to me…I cannot go anywhere without picking up stones. There is a comfort in them. I had to ship stones home after collecting so many while backpacking in Alaska. Thanks for your article!

Donovan had a wonderful song about this (“Little pebble upon the sand…”). But then in the bridge he said, “The sun will always shine where you stand…”, which of course is not true. Doerr’s geologic precision gives a more developed picture of reality.
But like the butterfly’s wing flapping, every little thing we do contributes to the unfolding development of the cosmos. In the great movie being made what’s done is “in the reel”, in the real. It’s all we have, and it has to be enough. Every moment’s a choice.

I too am a collector of stones and an eager follower of “The Great Story) I appreciate the way in which Doerr makes all the universe connections. My wooden bowl of rocks had been tucked away, and I would choose one on which to meditate. Today I brought it back out and put it on my kitchen counter and it gave me comfort and inspiration. Thank you!

This is a lovely piece! Throughout my house and yard are dozens upon dozens of rocks and pebbles of all sizes, gleaned from beaches, river banks, deserts, or prairie dog towns, where fists-sized pieces of rose quartz were unceremoniously pushed upward by the house-cleaning rodents. I collect them because they’re beautiful (yes, I keep some wet, too!), or because they remind me of people or places I love, or because they have unusual shapes. Doerr’s piece affirms that I will continue to covet these little beauties provided by a living planet that is always on the move in some way.

I see the stolen faces of prisoners sitting in the sundried stale air collecting the odors of human existence, longing to be free. Crying for the relatives from whom they have been separated.Never to feel the wind or hear the birds. A melancoly drama to sadden the heart.

Native Americans call them Grandfather Rock and honor them as the oldest pieces/members of our planet.Pluck a flower from a field and it dies can a stone that is plucked also die, grasshopper?

Anthony Doerr’s reflections on various stones which weigh so beautifully on our imaginations—if we put them there in place of what needlessly and sensationally burdens them thanks to much of today’s national media - is so deeply refreshing!

Thanks to Mr. Doerr, I no longer feel so awkward when I pick up a choice stone, whether from the apron of basaltic rock gathered about the base of Mount Hood—seen from an east window in our Portland home—or several from many Oregon beaches where they glistened as the tide retracted slowly. The Pacific’s pure hands caress all of the stones just as I will when back home.  Often the ocean’s hands caress certain stones long enough that one I found last summer closely resembles a nesting Sand Plover refusing to leave her nest partly hidden in the tall grass covering one dune.  If I picked her up again from the table, would I see eggs or tiny chicks?  Believe me, her pale eggs are ready to hatch in my mind.

As a pebble mosaic artist and spawn of Rockhounds and Geologists I have lived a life as pebble gatherer, and have manifested my obsessive compulsive collecting in to an art form and career that has a geologically brief history of about 4,000 years.  I have mulled your very visions and thoughts through my mind so many countless times, but never found the eloquence to express them as you have here.  I am grateful to have been directed to your essay and am deeply moved, as I sit here in Sicily, with a bag of pebbles in my possession plucked from Pompeii, the Acropolis, Baalbek, The Roman Forum (they had already been moved by unknown hands).  They will fly back to Portland and rest amongst the masses in hopes of finding a niche in some altar to memory only I can muster.  We are all ‘particles of change, orbiting around the sun’ as Joni Mitchell once said, so we all go back in to the soup of geology in some way.